OpenAI did not spare $15.5 million to purchase the chat.com domain

OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, has acquired the chat.com domain for an estimated $15.5 million. Chat.com is one of the oldest domain names on the Internet, registered in September 1996. The owner sold it last year to a HubSpot CTO for $10 million, who then resold the domain to OpenAI.

Image source: OpenAI

The acquisition only became known after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a link to the domain on social network X (Twitter) yesterday. Previously, as The Verge reports, the domain belonged to Dharmesh Shah, the founder of the American software development company HubSpot.

In early 2023, Shah purchased this domain for $10 million, explaining the purchase by saying that he considers chat interfaces to be the next significant step in software development. “I bought chat.com because I believe chat UX (#ChatUX) is the future because communicating with computers through natural language is much more convenient and intuitive,” he wrote in his LinkedIn post.

A few months after the purchase, Shah sold the domain, without disclosing details of who became the new owner and how much the name was sold for. However, he confirmed that he sold the domain for more than he bought it for. Chat.com was sold for $15.5 million in March 2023, according to domain sales database NameBio, which coincides with Shah’s post in May announcing the sale. The buyer and seller declined to comment on the deal to the press.

As The Verge notes, the domain acquisition coincides with OpenAI’s rebranding efforts. So, in September of this year, the company announced a new series of models that are capable of reasoning, called “o1”, which, according to former head of research, Bob McGrew, is a step towards more “clear” names for the company’s products . However, despite using the chat.com domain, which currently only serves to automatically redirect users to the ChatGPT website, OpenAI has not yet changed the official name of its product.

In the tech world, buying expensive domains is not uncommon. For example, just a few months ago, the startup Friend acquired the friend.com domain for $1.8 million after attracting investments in the amount of $2.5 million. And against the background of the $6.6 billion recently received by OpenAI, the amount of $10 million seems insignificant.